8 The Sunday Times December 19, 2021BUSINESS
When Alison and Mike Battle
took their four young sons to
Lapland in 2001 to meet
Santa, they had high
expectations — but returned
disheartened. “The setting
was beautiful but Father
Christmas disappointed,”
says Alison, 56. “We had to
take our own presents and he
didn’t know anything about
our boys. There was no
personalisation.”
Their solution was to set
up LaplandUK, now a multi-
million pound set deep in the
Whitmore forest near Ascot.
For six weeks a year, well-
heeled families pay up to £179
per ticket to meet Father
Christmas, go ice-skating and
take part in activities in the
elves’ toy-making workshop.
In 2020, the company had
revenues of £8.3 million and
made a profit of £849,000.
Growing up, Mike, also 56,
had a flair for creativity but
was steered towards a careerin the City. At 20, he was
headhunted by Goldman
Sachs and flown to an
interview in New York, but
turned a job down “because I
got the feeling they were
going to... own all of me”.
Instead, he became an
independent hedge fund
manager and worked from
home so he could spend time
with Alison and their sons,
now in their 20s. “I never
missed a nativity play, never
missed a tooth,” Mike says.
When Alison, who
retrained as a primary school
teacher in her 20s after a brief
stint in TV, grew frustrated at
the lack of high-quality
Christmas experiences, the
seed for LaplandUK was
planted. “I was always
thinking, why couldn’t it be
bespoke to each family?”
Alison recalls.
Driven by Mike’s creative
vision and Alison’s ambition
to create something magical
for children in what she
describes as “the wonder
years”, they forged ahead,
and in 2007 sold 37,000back the assets in a pre-pack
deal. “We had to raise about a
million pounds to get going
again,” Mike says. Despite the
poor reputation of pre-packs
as an opportunity to jettison
loss-making parts of
companies, Mike says he
“rang everybody personally
that was affected” to explain
the situation. Many of their
original suppliers still work
with them today.
Today it is a very different
operation, with 700 staff and
a core, permanent team of 25.
Father Christmases wear
handmade beards costing
£1,000; the performers’
costumes average £4,000
each; and the set is designed
by the aptly named Sonja
Klaus, who worked on
Hollywood films.
The pandemic presented a
new challenge last year. One-
way systems still remain in
place and larger performance
spaces allow for social
distancing between groups.
Mike’s advice for
entrepreneurs is to do
something they believe in.
“The Countess of Wessex
visited with their children for
ten consecutive years, so the
Queen’s grandchildren’s
belief in Christmas is what we
have created — it’s an
incredible legacy,” he says.The couple bringing Lapland to Ascot
tickets for their first event,
held near Tunbridge Wells. It
took £400,000 of the
couple’s savings to get the
business off the ground.
Their success was short-
lived, thanks both to the
looming financial crash and
an unscrupulous imitator
setting up shop in 2008.
Lapland New Forest was shut
down after only six days.
“They ran a copycat,
diabolical version,” Mike says.
The following year was a
disaster, as people confused
them with the rogue
operation — but the Battles
believed they could bring the
business back from the brink.
The company went into
administration in January
2010 and the owners boughtHOW WE MADE IT
ALISON AND MIKE BATTLE
FOUNDERS OF LAPLANDUKHannah Prevett
Deputy editor, Times
Enterprise NetworkThe Battles run a team of 25,
rising to 700 at ChristmasIt offers
bitesize
Biblical
excerpts
and
prayer
requests
HR, which Beccle, a tireless networker
who reckons he has sent “thousands” of
cold emails to investors and potential
business partners, set up with Costa. In an
interview this year on a Christian TV
channel, Costa said the idea for Glorify
was inspired by meditation apps Calm
and Headspace. “I looked at those apps
and thought, ‘Why isn’t something doing
this but with a Christian perspective?’”
What has unfolded since is down to a
mix of perseverance, luck, guile and, per-
haps most importantly, connections. Bec-
cle is not particularly religious but Costa
is. Beccle said: “I’ve always admired his
faith. It’s been this amazing kind of rock
that makes him just so unshakeable.”Unholy alliance?
Ed Beccle, James
Corden, Michael
Bublé and Kris
JennerSEASON FOUR OF
DANNY IN THE VALLEYANALYST
BENEDICT
EVANS:
‘OLD TECH,
NEW
MARKETS’THESUNDAYTIMES.CO.UK/DANNYINTHEVALLEYT
H,
S’
A 22-year-old from Oxford has raised millions in Silicon Valley for a Bible app taking the US by storm, and he’s not even that religious
Praise be, we’ve got a hot app to God
E
d Beccle ticks through the occa-
sions over the past year when
he realised that his life had,
suddenly, taken an entirely dif-
ferent turn. There was the
night that Michael Ovitz, the
former Disney boss, invited
the 22-year-old Brit — just off
the plane and straight into a
high-powered dinner party in
Los Angeles — to stay at his mansion. “I
didn’t know who he was,” Beccle said. “I
had heard his name, though.”
Then there was the day that James Cor-
den picked him up in his Range Rover and
they sang Coldplay on their way to yet
another dinner party. And there was the
dinner with the media personality Kris
Jenner, and the daily texts and phone
calls with crooner Michael Bublé.
A-listers have been wooing Beccle
because he has one of the hottest apps
around — and it’s about God. With Henry
Costa, 34, son of former Lazard chairman
Ken Costa, he is the co-founder of Glorify,
a subscription prayer app that offers
“bite-sized Bible passages”, guided
reflections and “prayer requests” for
friends and family. It is Jesus for Gen-
Zers, church on a smartphone, in zippy,
short bursts. And it has got a lot of rich
and famous people very excited.
The two-year-old London start-up this
month raised $40 million (£30 million)
from SoftBank, blue-chip venture firm
Andreessen Horowitz and a boatload of
Hollywood elites, Ovitz, Corden, Jenner
and Bublé all included. The round valued
the company at $250 million. It has 2 mil-
lion users either paying the $48 annual
subscription or opting for the free option.
Beccle said of its appeal: “I often look
at businesses like Facebook — they have a
huge community and an incredible num-
ber of people on that platform. And it’s
like, what binds them all together?...
When you look at us, it’s this shared belief
in Christ, a shared belief in God, and that
is the strongest fabric of all time.”
The story starts years before. Beccle
was born in Hong Kong. His mother was a
fund manager, his father worked in
advertising. They relocated to Oxford
when he was eight and at the age of 13 he
was diagnosed with type 1 diabetes,
which meant he missed a lot of school.
The kernel for his first business — an app
to hire and pay tutors — was born. He
explained: “That was the semi-advent of
Uber and I decided to see if I, like so many
people, could build my Uber of ‘X’.”
When he was 17, a Chinese company paid
to license the tutoring venture. “That was
my sort of exit,” he said. “After the deal, I
basically left school to start my next app.”
He built a sales-management app,
another for the aviation industry and a
third for human resources, called GraspTied to that faith was a big untapped
market: 2.5 billion Christians on the
planet have largely been bypassed by the
digital revolution.T
hey launched Glorify in English and
it did not go well. They made their
first big breakthrough with a Portu-
guese version for Brazil, which has a
large Catholic population. The key,
as it often is these days, was influen-
cers. They signed up Deive Leon-
ardo, an online pastor with more than
10 million followers on Instagram, as
a brand ambassador. He posted
about Glorify last January, encour-
aging his followers to sign up. ”It
just went haywire,” Beccle said.
“We had like 60,000, 70,000
downloads in the first 48 hours.”
America and Britain still lagged.
A chance encounter in London with
a tech billionaire helped speed
things up. This person, who Beccle
would not name, introduced him to
two people: Connie Chan, a partner at
Andreessen, and Michael Kives, a
former agent turned investor who is
known as one of the most connected men
in Hollywood. “I did a call with both of
them and they both wanted to invest,
which was a dream come true.”
Kives invited him to a dinner party in
Beverly Hills. Beccle did what any young
entrepreneur on the make would. He
booked a flight via Mexico, where he had
to quarantine for two weeks to comply
with Covid restrictions, and went straight
to Kives’s mansion, which was teeming
with some of the most famous people in
the world. This was where he met Ovitz,
Bublé and countless others. “It’s just got-
ten crazier and crazier and crazier every
single day,” Beccle said. “I am in com-
plete bewilderment at my life.”
It might be great to have celebrities on
board, but there is a quid pro quo. They
need to provide connections, to pump up
Glorify, to become ambassadors. “Any-
one on the cap table [an investor] who we
let in has to have incredible value one
way or another,” Beccle said. “The
money isn’t the thing we really need.”
Paulo Passoni, head of SoftBank Latin
America, said leveraging influencers, “is
how big brands are built now.” And why
did he invest? “Ed and Harry, and espe-
cially Ed. Whenever people start compa-
nies when they’re teenagers. That jumps
out at me. It’s not very common,” he said.
Glorify also employs some tried-and-
tested social media manipulation. The
app promotes “streaks”, a feature that
was controversially pioneered by Snap-
chat and that promotes and celebrates
consecutive days on the app.
Beccle is riding a strange wave. His
app, which “gives you access to God on
your own terms”, has been co-opted by
fame-obsessed Hollywood and godless
Silicon Valley. People in those fields are in
the hits business. Most projects that they
back, be they companies or striving
would-be stars, flame out.
Beccle is working hard to steer Glorify
from a similar fate and on to the Promised
Land — with a little help from his friends.
“There are a lot of fair-weather friends
out in LA,” he said. “I guess I’ve only
really had fair weather so far.”Computer says:
clear your desk
The same email pinged into
the inboxes of 150 people in
the Russian office of Xsolla, a
California video game
payments company. It was
bad news. The recipients, the
email said, had been found to
be “unengaged and
unproductive”. They were
fired. Not by managers, but
by an algorithm.
The automated system
tracked and ranked employee
activity on a 100-point scale,
judging on everything from
participation in meetings to
starting and finishing job
“tickets”. Fall below a certain
level and you got the chop.
In a leaked email
explaining the August mass
firing, chief executive
Alexandr Agapitov said: “You
received this email because
my big-data team analysed
your activities in Jira,
Confluence, Gmail, chats,
documents, dashboards and
tagged you as unengaged and
unproductive employees. In
other words, you were not
always present at the
workplace when you worked
remotely. Many of you might
be shocked but I truly believe
that Xsolla is not for you.”
It sounds brutal, but
Agapitov is not an outlier.
Covid has accelerated
artificial intelligence’s
invasion of the human
resources department — and
it is not just determining who
gets fired. Mark Girouard, an
employment lawyer at Nilan
Johnson Lewis, said that the
pandemic had led to a sharp
increase in the use of
automated screening tools.
“When you can’t do face-to-
face interviews, an AI-scored
video interview starts to look
a lot more attractive,” he said.
Algorithms, however, are
designed by humans, who
may unconsciously imbue
them with biases. The
datasets upon which they
train may also reflect past
inequities that they are
designed to avoid. New York
City has passed an ordinance
requiring anyone using
automated screening
software to tell candidates
they are being scored by a
machine and the basic
parameters of the evaluation.
If someone actually lands a
job, a host of different
systems kick in to track
progress, often to influence
advancement or stagnation.Girouard said: “You’ve got all
this data about your current
employees. If you are running
algorithms across it, you can
[identify] the strong
performers who, based on
this algorithm, we think
would perform well in, for
example, a leadership role.
Who should we invest our
resources in?”
Companies have used
algorithms to assess workers
for ages. A salesperson has a
quota. Miss it and they’re out.
The worry is that companies
assume AI is infallible. It is
not, say industry insiders.
John Jersin, the former
head of product management
at LinkedIn, now an investor,
said: “As soon as AI started
getting popularised, there
was this idea that we would
be able to manage people’s
performance using
algorithms that can interpret
more subtle signs.
“By and large, that has not
panned out.”
Uber was ordered by
British and Dutch courts this
year to reinstate and pay
compensation to six drivers —
five of them British — who
claimed they were wrongly
fired by its automated
evaluation system. Amazon
has been slammed for the
system it uses to track the
thousands of contract drivers
who deliver packages with
their own vehicles.
If there were one job that
offered the best potential use
case for an algorithmic
evaluator, it would be a
software engineer writing
code on a computer. But just
as algorithms can fail to take
into account, say, heavy
traffic that delays a delivery
driver, nor can they assess
the nuances of programming.
Jersin said: “One person
might write ten lines of code
that’s incredibly challenging
and quite brilliant. And
another person might write
1,000 lines of code that’s
incredibly simple and
much more verbose than
needed. You just can’t really
compare those.”
In the Xsolla case, the
company had seen a sharp
slowdown and Agapitov was
worried it was due to remote
work, so he fired up the
algorithm. It is unclear what
the program measured,
however, beyond presence or
generalised activity.ILLUSTRATION: JAMES COWENTECH TALK
DANNY FORTSON IN SAN FRANCISCO
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